Braille Embosser

Inspiration

While brainstorming project ideas for social impact, we were shocked to discover that "budget" braille printers costed around $1,000. We believed that it would make a meaningful difference if these printers could be more accessible to the visually impaired community at under $150, as braille is "a much better way to understand punctuation, grammar and spelling than audio" (Royal National Institute of Blind People, UK).

What it does

Our braille printer embosses braille characters onto standard printer paper given a text input.

How we built it

We brought many random tools and supplies from home, and built the printer with aluminum extrusions, 3D printed parts, servo motors, and the parts we were graciously lent by the Detkin Lab, including 3 stepper motors and drivers, a power supply, an Arduino kit, and an MDF sheet. We designed the printer using the CAD software Autodesk Fusion, and 3D printed the parts with a Bambu Lab A1 we brought from home. We programmed the UI in Python, and programmed the Arduino in C++.

Challenges we ran into

For three out of us four, this was our first hackathon. Time management was a challenge we foresaw, but took great lengths to overcome. The project was also very complex, having three degrees of freedom and requiring the incredible precision of braille characters. 3D printing parts also takes a lot of time, so working as a team and assigning work was a challenge we faced this weekend.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the progress we have made on the braille printer, and also the teamwork and time-management we developed. We worked efficiently, and we're extremely proud of building what we did.

What we learned

We learned how to collaborate effectively, and each member learned different things. Brandon learned more CAD principles, creating positive and negative molds of braille characters, as well as the fundamentals and standards of braille. Jacob learned how to work with stepper motors, stepper drivers, and arduino, doing the wiring and designing a part of the actuation. Jerry learned about stepper drivers and belt tensioning, designing the gantry and belt actuation. Oliver learned about arduino, mechanical design principles, and C++, doing the programming.

What's next for Braille Engraver

We hope to add more features to improve the speed and reliability of the braille printing, such as automatic paper feeding and automatic alignment. We would also substitute several components with better ones, such as the v-wheels we 3D printed without bearings.

Built With

• 3d-printing
• arduino
• autodesk-fusion-360
• c++
• cad
• python